For many years now the use of cookies on mobile has left you with a bad taste; they have simply failed to work reliably to provide mobile web analytics data. But times are a changing…

Where cookies have been naively used for mobile products, the tracking of website visitors has often delivered far from accurate results and in recent years have given results significantly skewed towards the latest smartphones where cookie support is good enough.

Today we see a much improved market thanks in part to the Apple iPhone phenomonon and the competitive catchup by other leading phone manufacturers across all their handsets. Mobile browsers have now become more fully featured with support for the latest media and content.

In the last 18 months, the majority of new handsets support cookies correctly. However, relying on cookies alone is still not the best way to understand and engage with your mobile visitors. Here’s why:

• To start with there are still millions of older handsets in the market that do not support cookies reliably. While this situation is improving daily, if you only using cookies you will still end up missing a large percentage of your customers.
• We must also look beyond the handsets and browsers to the operators and the chosen network connections. Some operators systems still assume that handsets don’t support cookies correctly; they therefore grab the cookie and store it on their gateway server rather than on the device.

This behavior causes a whole range of inconsistencies with consumer identification, especially now we see consumers moving between operator internet or WAP gateway connections and local WiFi networks. In that instance the cookie that was stored on the operator gateway is no longer visible from the WiFi connection, typically resulting in new cookies and a new identity being set.

Lastly, don’t forget that mobile delivers far more than desktop - it’s not the poor cousin. Mobile phones have their own identity and are usually associated with a single customer. Bango is able to leverage this fact along with a range of industry partnerships to deliver a visitor identification system far more advanced than simple cookies.

You simply ask us for your visitor’s identity through a simple, consistent Identifier API. We use data gathered from our relationships and a decade of mobile knowledge about devices and operator gateways to deliver a consistent user ID that can be relied on. The Bango User ID is the best way to understand and build a strong lasting relationship with each of your customers.

Labels: Mobile, Mobile Analytics

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